


Out of Mind

by Rizandace



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 16:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4843184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizandace/pseuds/Rizandace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I pictured it with an amount of lucidity that bordered on the absurd - I pictured Michael, and Linds, and Gus, and everybody else who loved me coming to knock on the door of my mind. They'd find the door ajar, and they'd open it up and walk inside my mind and find that I'd gone out of it. I wasn't there anymore. I was elsewhere. I was nowhere. Out of. The only place it was safe to be." Brian ruminates on the idea of going out of his mind, and thinks it might be a good idea. WARNING: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks a million to the wonderful Emynn for giving me her thoughts! Please let me know in comments what you thought of the story - I'm understandably nervous about it, and I'd appreciate to hear your reactions!

**After**

I've always found one of the most interesting questions in all of the English language to be "are you out of your mind?" When somebody asks you if you're  _out of_   _your mind_ , they mean to ask you, rhetorically, if you've gone crazy - they mean to inform you that whatever idea you've just had is monumentally stupid.

It's what Mikey said to me when I told him about sucking off our gym teacher freshman year of high school. "Are you out of your mind?!"

It's what Debbie told me on any number of occasions, when she'd caught me corrupting her son into drinking or getting high or fucking strangers. "Are you out of your goddamned mind, kid?"

It's what Ted said when he heard I was going to donate my swimmers to the munchers so they could have a baby.

It's what Michael said - again - when he heard I was letting Justin move back in with me after he was bashed. He didn't mean anything cruel by it, but he knew how fucked up Justin was and he didn't think I was capable of handling that kind of crazy. Maybe I wasn't; I don't know.

But the point is, I've always thought the idea of "out of mind" to be fascinating. If somebody is out of their mind, then where are they? Have they gone elsewhere? What is there outside of the mind?

Out of my mind was pretty much how I felt when Justin died.

I didn't feel angry, or depressed, or hysterical - well, okay, I did, but not at first. My very first thought upon realizing that Justin was actually gone was that I'd gone out of my mind. I pictured it with an amount of lucidity that bordered on the absurd - I pictured Michael, and Linds, and Gus, and everybody else who loved me coming to knock on the door of my mind. They'd find the door ajar, and they'd open it up and walk inside my mind and find that I'd gone out of it. I wasn't there anymore. I was elsewhere. I was nowhere. Out of. The only place it was safe to be.

* * *

 **24 Days Before**  

"I was thinking about visiting my mom next month, when you're in Chicago." We were lying in bed, in our ridiculously oversized master bedroom at the house (which I refused to call Britin, because I'd recovered from my post-bombing personality transplant). Truth be told, I was having a little trouble registering what Justin had just said, since I was still shaking through the aftermath of a truly spectacular orgasm. But I refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing that, so I reached for a cigarette to stall for time while I waited for my heart to slow down and the room to stop spinning.

"Worried you'll be lonely without me?" I said with a smirk, although it was difficult to do around the cigarette in my mouth. Justin slapped my hip half-heartedly in retaliation.

"Obviously. You know I can't stand a day away from you, much less three whole lonely nights!" He said it sarcastically, and it made me feel a little bit unsteady, because I usually managed to miss him before he'd even fully exited a room. But Justin knew me - way, way, too well - and he squirmed his way up in the bed a little bit, plucked the cigarette from my mouth, and kissed me softly on the lips. "I always miss you when you're not with me."

"You, Sunshine, are seriously pathetic," I said, but since I was staring up at him with what I'm sure was an unforgivably lovesick expression, I'm not sure the insult had much of an impact.

Justin laughed at me and poked at my side, too hard to tickle, not hard enough to hurt. I squirmed away anyway, because I knew it would make him smile. "I already talked to Dan - he says my mom isn't working on Friday, so I figure I'll fly out during the day Friday, get back Tuesday in time for my meeting with the gallery people on Wednesday."

"I'm getting back on Monday," I said, and then grimaced when I realized it sounded like pouting.

"Look who's worried about loneliness now?" Justin teased. I kissed him to shut him up, and there wasn't a lot of talking after that.

* * *

 **After**  

I think a good sign of a fucked up life is when you can't decide on the worst moment you've had because there are too many promising contenders. Before meeting Justin, I would have counted all my worst moments as having happened when I was a kid, living at home with dear old mom and dad. There were certainly a lot of bad memories to choose from. But after meeting Justin it seemed that all the worst moments of my life had to do with him. I guess that's what happens when you fall so desperately in love with someone that your happiness becomes inseparable from his.

The worst moment was when I watched the bat swing towards his head. The worst moment was waiting for an ambulance and feeling sure that it was too late, that Justin was dead, that it was my fault because I'd dared to love him. The worst moment was every moment after that, waiting in the hospital, feeling like a fraud for caring, for refusing to leave until I knew he wasn't going to die.

The worst moment was when he walked away from me at a party I'd thrown for him in some desperate attempt to get him to understand how I felt - the worst moment was watching him kiss that fucking fiddler and know that it had been too late, probably for a while now.

The worst moment was when he packed his bags and told me we wanted different things. The worst moment was feeling my throat close up around the words I knew would make him stay - "we don't want different things. I want to be with you. Always. For the rest of my life. Please stay. I love you." Any or all of the above would have done the fucking trick, and yet I didn't say a word.

The worst moment was sitting in a cab on the way to the airport, trying to run away from Justin, from the way it made me feel to see him and know I couldn't touch him, and then hearing  _Babylon, explosion, casualties_ , and feeling blood drain down out of my face, my heart stutter, my gut clench, everything in me lock down, every second of loving him suddenly choking me with terror.

The worst moment was Cynthia walking into my office, her eyes wide and pained. "There was an accident." My brain, I remember, had split into two precise halves when she said that. Gus or Justin? She'd only be looking at me that way if it were Gus or Justin, and when she said "Justin" I felt a fraction of a second's relief for my son, and then I went out of my mind.

* * *

 **8 Days Before**  

The diner was abnormally full the Monday morning before my Chicago trip, but I was too busy sucking face with Justin to notice it properly. Jokes about loneliness aside, we both fucking hated being apart. I'd actually been considering asking him to come with me to Chicago, but I knew we'd barely get to see each other since I'd be so busy in client meetings and checking in on the fledgling branch of Kinnetik that we'd just opened the previous year. Plus, Jennifer had been hounding Justin to come visit her and her hubby in their fancy new digs in Connecticut, and it seemed like a good opportunity. As a result of the pending separation, Justin and I had become - according to everybody who had to spend time in a room with the two of us - utterly nauseating.

"Jesus Christ, you two, this is a public place!" Debbie screeched as we sat down - a four-legged, single-torso-ed entity - in a booth across from Ted and Michael without ungluing our mouths.

I pulled my lips away from Justin long enough to stick my tongue out at her, and Justin responded by grabbing my face to force my tongue back into his own mouth, to the general displeasure of our table companions. We relented when Debbie smacked Justin upside the head with one of the menus, but I kept my arm around him, and his hand continued to creep distractingly up my thigh while we greeted the gang.

"I don't get it," Michael said as he watched my hand play with the hair at the back of Justin's neck. Can't you two go three days without seeing each other?"

I tried not to roll my eyes at the hint of a whine in Michael's voice, and failed. 

"I think what Michael means to ask," Ted began, sounding wise, "is why the two of you can't manage to go without each other without making a big spectacle out of it first. I mean, you've spent much longer apart - you'd think you'd be used to it by now."

Justin glared at Ted, a rare occurrence, as the two of them usually got along annoyingly well. "We're not making a spectacle."

"Honey, you could have charged every person in the diner a fee for the privilege of seeing that show," Emmett said, appearing from the other side of the diner and fanning himself absurdly with a bundle of napkins. "I got a little flustered myself, I must admit."

I knew they were just teasing, but the truth was, there was a pretty good reason for our... well, Justin once called it "separation anxiety," and then insisted we go to couple's therapy, at which point I'd been forced to fuck the idea out of him before he got stubborn. It wasn't some bullshit thing where I couldn't stand to be away from him for any length of time because our love was just so fucking strong and pure or whatever the fuck. And it wasn't anxiety. I could manage perfectly fine without Justin for a few days, and I did often for work. I just really, really hated it.

If forced to analyze why, (and Justin  _had_  forced me as a compromise when I point-blank refused his ludicrous therapy idea) I'd have to say it was because of New York. We hadn't actually broken up when Justin had moved there, despite my decidedly gloomy attitude about the whole thing. Justin was, fortunately for us both, extremely stubborn. But it hadn't been exactly a fun two years for either of us when it came to our relationship. And there had been more than one occasion when I'd pushed him away hard enough that Justin had started to give up on me. There had been a few very depressing times when I'd believed we were really done. And so sue me if I wanted him close to me, now that we were back in the same city, now that we'd actually been cohabitating with relative peace and happiness for the past three years. My so-called friends could just fuck off if it bothered them.

"I think it's sweet," Emmett said, practically cooing. It was disturbing enough that I nearly untangled myself from around Justin just to get Emmett to stop looking at us like that. Nearly.

* * *

**After**

Cynthia drove me to the hospital because I was incapable of independent movement. I think I started crying before the doctor even told me that Justin was dead, that he'd been alive upon arriving at the hospital but he'd bled out in the OR, and I don't think I stopped for a long time. But I wasn't really there. My body had started the appropriate grieving protocol, but my mind, in some desperate attempt at self-preservation, had shoved me out. I didn't even register Michael, Daphne, Debbie, Jennifer, with Molly and Dan in tow, arriving at the hospital. It was like I blinked, and they were all there, Michael looking worriedly at my face, tears streaking his own cheeks. Debbie was touching me, Jennifer was sobbing, and none of it mattered, none of it registered because I didn't even exist in that moment.

After an indescribable length of time, a thought finally broke through the fog, and it shoved me back into my mind, kicking and screaming desperately to get away from the truth. It was the doctor's fault. He'd told me, trying to be as fucking gentle as possible, like that would make it less devastating, that Justin had woken up in the ambulance. He'd said my name. The doctor also fed me some bullshit about how he probably hadn't felt much pain, but I'm thinking that with that much trauma, the very fact that he was conscious probably meant that he was hurting - that he had been - he'd asked for me –

I was standing in the hospital, in a hallway that was too bright. Lindsay had arrived at some point. She was on one side of me. Michael on the other. They tried to catch me when my legs buckled under me, but they couldn't. I relished the pain of my knees hitting the floor.

* * *

 **5 Days Before**  

"Why do you need two suitcases for a three day trip?" Justin asked me. He sounded exasperated, but I could hear the laughter in his voice. We'd had the same argument dozens of times - every time I visited him in New York, he'd been appalled at the amount of clothing I dragged in to his shitty little apartment. There had been one memorable weekend when I'd brought a whole extra empty suitcase, with the intent of filling it with a shopping spree. We'd spent the entire weekend naked, and I'd left the empty suitcase for Justin to use on his next trip home. 

"I'm trying to woo new clients, here. I have to be ready for all possible scenarios."

"Planning on taking these potential clients clubbing?" Justin asked, and now there was an actual edge to his voice. He lifted up one of my sleeveless black shirts from the top of the suitcase open on our bed. 

I shrugged, trying not to let my shoulders go tense at the slightly accusatory tone. We weren't technically monogamous, but there were certain things that were newly taboo - one of the worst fights Justin and I had ever had had been about a year previously, when I'd fucked a new Kinnetik client, and then been awkwardly forced to accept an invitation from his wife to go out to dinner with her husband and my partner. I hadn't told Justin ahead of time that I'd fucked him, but he’d had figured it out as we sat across from the husband and wife in a swanky restaurant that Justin hadn't even wanted to be at in the first place. He always knew.

Later that night, he'd accused me of being an insensitive prick who didn't care at all about breaking up a marriage. I'd accused him of being overly sensitive and jealous, and the whole thing had ended with a furious, intense fuck on the kitchen table and a promise that I wouldn't screw around with my clients anymore. 

"One of them is gay. He expressed interest in the club scene. I told him I knew a few places."

Justin was silent.

"I'm not going to fuck him, Justin." I tried not to sound angry, but I don't think it worked.

"You don't fucking believe me, do you? So, what, because you see that I'm bringing club clothes to Chicago, suddenly I'm cheating on you?"

"I don't want to fight."

I almost let some antagonistic retort escape from my lips, but I bit it back at the last second. I didn't want to fight either. "I don't want you to feel like you can't trust me," I said instead, tampering down the bite in my tone as best as I could.

"I trust you." A pause. "I'm just an idiot."

That made me smile despite myself, and I turned around to face him, opening my arms just in time for him to walk into them. "No you're not. But I meant it - I've never broken a promise to you. You don't have to worry about me with my clients."

Justin just nodded into my collarbone, and after a few seconds he started to kiss me, across the part of my chest he could reach above my shirt, up to my neck, behind my ear, and I let him, stumbling backwards toward the bed and knocking the suitcase off of it and onto the floor to make room.

* * *

**After**

I think I let myself remain  _in my mind_  for about an hour, there in the hospital, thinking about how Justin was dead, how I wished I was dead, about how nothing made sense and there was no point of any of it and was this supposed to hurt so fucking bad? It didn't seem possible. Just one hour. That's how long it took before the doctors took pity on me and gave me a sedative. Or maybe it wasn't pity. Maybe I was upsetting the other patients with all my fucking hysterics. I don't know. I fell asleep in a hospital bed, and when I woke up I was out of my mind again, which made it better.

The thing I never understood about dying is that it  _can't_  be understood, so when somebody that you love dies, you're left not only bereft, but also confused. Of course, I was sad that he was dead, but that word, sad, or any of its more melodramatic synonyms - devastated, heartbroken, crushed, destroyed - couldn't really convey what it was like. In the beginning, mostly it just felt like I was missing him a lot, and it wasn't all that different from how I'd felt when we'd been apart in the past. When he was in L.A., or in New York, or with Ethan or any of the other times I'd done something stupid and he'd left, I'd felt this sort of constant pit in my stomach, like my body knew I was going without something essential.  After Justin died, I felt the ordinary ache of longing, multiplied by a thousand. And then in the middle of all that normal, albeit intensified pain of missing him I'd remember that he wasn't going to be able to go to Paris with me in the winter like we'd planned, or I'd think about how he was never going to sleep in our bed again, and I'd be hit with the obvious and unavoidable fact that he was actually gone, permanently, and that was a whole different kind of pain.

As badly as it might have hurt to be away from Justin before, it was never fucking permanent. It may have felt that way sometimes, but it wasn't. As badly as it had hurt to see him with Ethan, or to see him walking around Liberty Ave after he'd left me, just before Babylon had blown up... well, at least then I  _could_  fucking see him in the first place.

I missed things I didn't even know I had loved about him. The way his body was all soft and warm when we fucked in the morning before I got up to go to work. The way his hair smelled. The way he was ticklish under his left arm but not his right. The way his nose scrunched up when I made a stupid joke and he didn't want to reward me by laughing. The way he kissed my surgical scar during sex, like it was any other part of my body. And I missed the things I'd always loved about him, even early on, when I was fighting the very idea of him. Like the way he never let anybody underestimate him because of his age, or how he was unapologetic about his opinions, how he never bothered with false modesty, how he knew what he wanted and he went after it with everything he had. How he somehow managed to be a good friend to me even when we weren't speaking, and how he'd fought tooth and nail to get his life back after he'd nearly died.

It seemed so profoundly unfair that he didn't have a chance to fight again, because I knew he would have won.

I became unbelievably resentful of every fucking second we'd spent away from each other while he was alive. I was suddenly cursing Kinnetik, cursing my friends, New York, myself (especially myself), anything and everything that had ever forced me away from him for any length of time whatsoever.

To put it simply, I was drowning. I tried to spend all my time out of my mind, because it was slightly less agonizing than being in it, and feeling it all full-force. But it didn't really work. My mind kept pulling me back in.

* * *

**4 Days Before**

"If you keep strangling me I'm going to miss my flight," I said, my voice strained half with laughter and half with the combined weight of two suitcases and Justin, who had attached himself to my back like a limpet.

"Oh please," Justin said dryly, as we finally reached the foyer and he disconnected himself from around my neck. "You practically suffocated me all last night." Fair point - I may have fallen asleep entirely on top of him the night before, but in my defense, he was the reason I'd been incapable of movement or higher brain function after our last fuck of the evening.

I didn't really have a response, so instead I just tugged him forward and kissed him some more, despite the fact that my lips were literally sore from how often I'd been kissing him over the last twenty-four hours. He was still in nothing but his briefs, since his flight to Connecticut didn't leave until the afternoon, and I thought briefly about how it would feel to fuck him when he was naked and I was fully clothed, but I really was going to be late, so I just kept kissing him instead.

"You're going to miss your flight," Justin said, or more accurately tried to say while still kissing me, so it came out more like mush.

"My cab's already out front," I said, mush-like right back. 

He disconnected our mouths and hugged me tight. "See you on Tuesday."

I smiled, pecked him on the nose, and walked out the front door.

* * *

**After**

He was on his way to me, from the airport, when he died. He'd told the cab driver to take him straight to Kinnetik - I know that because they told me where the accident happened, and he'd been heading in to the city, not out to the house. We hadn't seen each other since Friday. I'd gotten back to Pittsburgh the night before. I'd talked to him on the phone. I'd tried to get him to have phone sex with me but he'd refused, because his mom was in the next room. He'd acted scandalized by the very suggestion of anything improper, and like it always did, the hints of WASP in him made me laugh. He'd promised me a pornographic greeting when he saw me the next day.

Losing him didn't really get any easier. It didn't feel like something that had happened to me; it felt like a process, like I was still losing him, like every day I lost even more, like I was still falling, falling, falling, and all I wanted was to hit the bottom but I never could.

I kept having this nightmare where he woke up in the ambulance, weak and crying and in pain, and he asked for me, and the paramedics had to tell him that I wasn't there, that I hadn't shown up to help him. 

One time, I'd flipped out and nearly attacked Michael because I'd come home from work to find he'd come to the house while I was away and cleaned up. He'd washed the sheets on the bed. When I insisted that Justin's pillow smelled like him, Michael had been aghast. "Brian... it's been over a year. It doesn't smell like anything." I'd been completely dumbfounded, and it was then that I knew I was totally fucked, and I wasn't going to get better, because it had been a year, and I hadn't even realized it, and everything still hurt just as badly as it had the day he'd died. Maybe worse. 

I missed Gus's eleventh birthday party. I'd found one of Justin's pencils in the couch cushions and spent several hours staring at it, remembering how annoyed I used to be when he left them lying around in places they didn’t belong, remembering him sketching me while I pretended to sleep, remembering too much and never enough.

Everybody avoided me. Even Michael. He tried to help at the beginning - they all did. But they quickly realized what I'd known from the very start. There was not a single thing that anybody could say, or do, that would make any of this okay.

* * *

**2 Days Before**

He called me on Sunday and I told him all about my brilliant business successes, and he told me about his mom's new place, which was apparently quite swanky, but "not as nice as Britin." I had one of those little epiphanies that I’d been having a lot lately, that I was really happy, and that for the very first time I wasn't afraid of being happy, because I finally trusted myself to be enough for him. I wanted to tell him all of that, but the words wouldn't come, so I finally just told him that Britin had better be the best goddamn house he'd ever seen, given the price I had paid for it, and he laughed, and I smiled. I said "later," he said "later." I loved that.

* * *

 **Way After**  

Eventually I forced myself to find a balance. I knew I was never going to fall in love again, never going to find that place of total peace and happiness within myself that I had when he was with me, but eventually I managed a middle ground. I could drive to the diner every once in a while and smile at Deb when she brought me bacon I didn't order. I could roll my eyes at the latest chapter of Emmett and Drew's constantly shifting love story. I went to Blake and Ted's wedding alone and only felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest a  _little_  bit.

There were a lot of bad days, of course, usually when I thought about all the really important stuff that Justin didn't know before he died, because I always figured he'd find out eventually. Like how I realized I loved him the night of his prom, or how the happiest day of my life was when he came back from New York and told me he was staying. I thought that he probably knew a lot of it, but occasionally the nagging worry that he might not have understood burrowed so deep within me that I felt my heart try to stop beating and I couldn't get out of bed in the morning.

It sounded fucking morbid, but really what made my life tolerable was the knowledge that I was going to die eventually. When Justin first died I kept wishing that I would just stop breathing, stop existing, but I never actually considered killing myself. It was sort of weird, that I never seriously thought about it, because nothing seemed important to me back then but the fact that Justin was dead. But there must have been some residual part of me that still loved Gus, and Michael, Lindsay, Debbie... even Jennifer, and I guess that part of me kept me together long enough so that I could crawl back to some semblance of sanity.

So I marked time. I found a way to be a better father to my son. I had lunch with Jennifer once a week and she usually cried while we ate our salads. I tried to reconcile long-standing differences with Mel. I kept expanding Kinnetik and I donated an absurd amount of money to programs for struggling art students, using the money I would have spent on Justin anyway. And I waited. I waited until I could let go, could stop dealing with endless coping.

I hadn't been religious since I was a very small child, and Justin wasn't either, but there was something comforting about the thought of joining him in the nowhere of death. There's no way to feel alone if you can't feel anything.

* * *

**1 Day Before**

On the phone, Justin's voice always sounded slightly lower than it did in person. It was extremely sexy, but for some reason the little brat wouldn't have phone sex with me. I grumbled about his prudishness a bit longer than necessary, but mostly the complaining was just an excuse not to hang up. Which I'm sure he knew perfectly well, but was kind enough not to mention.

"Love you," he said, as we both finally decided we should sleep. I rolled my lips inward to stop from smiling, then realized we were on the phone so he couldn't even see me, and let myself bask in it, just a little. I wanted to tug him close by the waistband of the baggy sweatpants I imagined he was wearing as he lay in the guest bedroom of his mom's place.

"I know," I said. "Who wouldn't?"

"Fuck you," Justin said, and I knew he was smiling too. "I'll see you tomorrow. And I mean it, Brian - I love you." It was a ritual from the New York era - Justin somehow always knew when I needed to hear it, and he never expected me to say it back.

"See you tomorrow." Sometimes I  _did_  say it back, but not often, and not that night. I saved those words for special occasions, and Justin knew it all anyway.

**End**

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope I didn't devastate you too badly.


End file.
